illusory Cuts

Rather than taking the “true” or literal approach to materials, this project designed by Dave Bantz and Michael Gross attempts to adopt techniques mastered by artists and apply them at an architectural scale. Material in art is used as a representational device for effects and a gateway to sensation. The”Artificial Matters” studio, run by SCI-arc professor Elena Manferdini, aims to provoke new sensations through texture, geometry, coloration, and finish. The studio began by 3D scanning literal materials (in this case a sliced peach) and modifying the raw data to produce a synthetic material with the potential to create new sensations.

The project footnotes artists such as Murakami for his use of distortion through an object in the landscape, while the attempt here is to implement distortion and blurring of context and figuration. The conceptual pavilion proposal for the Milan 2015 Expo takes massing, which has traditionally been absolute and legible, and makes it simultaneously illusory and viscerally evocative. This is where fact and fiction coexist. The exterior causes a distortion and blurring of reality through refraction and density, blurring the figure. While the indexical cut reveals the interior materiality of the pavilion and is concerned with more visceral and immediate sublime sensations.

via suckerPUNCH